Can Social Drive As Much Traffic As Search?

13 Dec
2011

by Ben Elowitz

I’ve projected before that within the next couple of years, social can drive as much traffic as search to major media properties – especially those that are driven by real-time news.  But I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon!

Yesterday was a milestone here at Wetpaint:  social for the day drove over 45% of our audience visits; while search brought in about 30%.

Now consider this:  Layer on the ~150% higher lifetime value of our social audience (our social users stay longer, come back more frequently, and bring additional viral referrals), and social was responsible for over 60% of the value of our audience yesterday.

It may start as an outlier, but it’s going to get more common.  We are on track to be the #1 social publisher within a short time.  Want to know where you stand too?  Stay tuned for the updated media industry social leaderboard, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.

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